Film Screening of Sarah Pucill’s Magic Mirror at Cambridge University, on 13 June 2024.

The screening will be followed by a discussion between the filmmaker, and  Dr Diamuid Hester, who recently wrote about Claude Cahun in his book ‘Nothing Ever Just Disappears’. The discussion will be chaired by Cambridge doctoral researcher, Ciara Hervas.

Magic Mirror combines a re-staging of the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun’s black and white photographs with selected extracts from her book Aveux non avenus (1930, Confessions Denied). In Surrealist kaleidoscopic fashion the film creates a weave between image and word, exploring the links between Cahun’s photographs and writing as well as between those of the films of Sarah Pucill, as both artists share similar iconography and concerns.

Cahun’s multi-subjectivity as expressed in both her book and photographs, set the scene for the film, where she dresses and makes her face up in so many different ways, swapping identities between gender, age and the inanimate. Three women masquerade as Cahun’s characters: often it is hard to tell them apart. The splitting of identity appears as a double which persists throughout; as a literal double (through super-imposition), as shadow, imprints in sand, reflections in water, mirror or distorting glass.